Advanced Fiction Writing Blog

Just a quick housekeeping note to those of you who like to read your blogs using RSS feeds: I’ve now got hooked up with FeedBurner. I hope I did it correctly. If not, I’m sure all 7 billion of you will tell me and I’ll get it squared away. The link is in the sidebar at right. Have at it!

Thanks to all of you who made comments to yesterday’s post on dealing with email. Let me note that I already have my email organized in folders. Hundreds of ‘em. And I use filters. Hundreds of ‘em. Anyone I write to regularly has their own folder. Every conference I teach at has its own folder. All my email newsletters are subscribed to in digest form and they get filtered into a catchall folder for newsletters which I read at my leisure. Whenever someone buys something on my site, my system sends me several emails to let me know that each step in the process went through. All those get automatically filtered into their appropriate folders and they open up automatically for me to oversee. But a lot of email still comes into the general in-box, much of it from perfect strangers.

My policy is to answer all first-timer email that isn’t spam. So anyone who writes to me should get an answer at least once. However, a guy’s gotta have boundaries, and my boundaries are set so that if people respond to my response, I don’t feel obligated to continue the conversation. After all, I hear from hundreds of friends and thousands of strangers every year.

I do feel bad, though, when I run through the old email files and see requests for me to come speak at a conference and I never responded. Or requests from a friend to do a critique and I never answered. Those sorts of things happened last year a couple of times when I was in the middle of moving out of the old house or when I was moving into the new one. They just fell through the cracks, and because my in-box had a couple thousand emails in it, I didn’t notice them. So my new procedure is designed to prevent that in the future.

That’s all for today! Tomorrow, I think maybe we’ll switch gears and talk some about the M-word: “marketing”. If you’re a writer, you need to market yourself, and the sooner you start, the better. So I’ll want to talk about how you can do that. See ya then!

Just a quick note on housekeeping issues:

1) Some of you have asked why your comments didn’t appear right away but got shelved for moderation. Answer: I have my spam filters turned on quite tight for this blog. Anyone who posts a comment for the first time automatically gets moderated. After that, they can post comments unmoderated. Also, any post that contains a link will automatically be moderated, since all spam contains links. My spam filters have identified 126 comments as spam. Of those, 125 were real spam, some disgustingly filthy. 1 was a legitimate comment, which I allowed to post.

2) Thanks for all your suggestions on forum software! I appreciate your suggestions. I’ve got several candidates and will be narrowing it down as I study them carefully. I want to choose a good solution.

3) Those of you who have blogs, let me know if you’d like to be on my blogroll. If you have no blog but have a web site, I can put you on my Writers list. I’m thinking that I’ll limit most people to be either on my Writers list or on my blogroll, just so neither one gets overfull. So I’ll be trimming the duplicates out shortly. Don’t take offense–I just don’t think duplicates serve any useful purpose. I will allow duplicates for those of you who run editing services, for which I have a separate category.

4) Thanks to the many of you who’ve linked to me on your own blogs. My technorati rating is steadily improving. If you’ve linked to me and I haven’t yet reciprocated, just send me an email. I may simply not have noticed. It’s been busy lately.